“But after a while you do get used to it, don’t you?”
“After two or three days, you’ll be fine,” I said.
When we tired of walking, we went into the first restaurant we saw, drank draft beer, and ordered some salmon and potatoes. We’d walked in willy-nilly off the street and gotten lucky. The beer really hit the spot, and the food was actually good.
“Well then,” I said after coffee, “what say we settle on a place to stay?”
“I’ve already got an image of a place,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Never mind. Get a list of hotels and read off the names in order.”
I asked a waiter to bring over the yellow pages and started reading the names listed in the “Hotels, Inns” section. After forty names, she stopped me.
“That’s the one.”
“Which one?”
“The last one you read.”
“Dolphin Hotel,” I said.
“That’s where we’re staying.”
“Never heard of it.”
“But I can’t see us staying at any other hotel.”
I returned the phone book, then called the Dolphin Hotel. A man with an indistinct voice answered, indicating they had double and single rooms available. And did they have other types of rooms besides doubles and singles? No. Doubles and singles were all. Confused, I reserved a double. The price: forty percent less than what I’d expected.
The Dolphin Hotel was located three blocks west and one block south of the movie theater we’d gone to. A small place, totally undistinguished. Its undistinguishedness was metaphysical. No neon sign, no large signboard, not even a real entryway. The glass front door, which resembled an employees’ kitchen entrance, had next to it only a copper plate engraved with DOLPHIN HOTEL. Not even a picture of a dolphin.
The building was five stories tall, but it might as well have been a giant matchbox stood on end. It wasn’t particularly old; still it was strikingly run-down. Most likely it was run-down when it was built.
This was our Dolphin Hotel.
Yet she apparently fell in love with the place the moment she set eyes on it.
“Not a bad hotel, eh?” she said.
“Not bad?” I tossed back her words.
“Cozy, no frills.”
“No frills,” I repeated. “By frills, I’m sure you mean clean sheets or a sink that doesn’t leak or an air conditioner that works or reasonably soft toilet paper or fresh soap or curtains that prevent sunstroke.”
“You always look at the dark side of things,” she laughed. “Anyway, we didn’t come here as tourists.”
On opening the door, I found the lobby bigger than expected. In the middle of it was a set of parlor furniture and a large color TV; there was a quiz show on. Not a soul was in sight.
Large potted ornamentals sat on both sides of the front door, their leaves faded, nearly brown. I stood there taking everything in. The lobby was actually a lot less spacious than it had initially seemed. It appeared large because there were so few pieces of furniture. The parlor set, a grandfather clock, and a mirror. Nothing else.
I walked over and checked out the clock and mirror. Both were commemorative presents of some event or another. The clock was seven minutes off; the mirror made my head crooked on my body.
The parlor set was about as run-down as the hotel itself. The sofa was an unappealing orange, the sort of orange you’d get by leaving a choicely sunburnt weaving out in the rain for a week, then throwing it into the cellar until it mildewed. This was an orange from the early days of Technicolor.
On closer inspection, a balding middle-aged man lay, stretched out like a dried fish, asleep on the parlor set chaise longue. At first, I thought he was dead, but his nose twitched. There were the indentations of eyeglasses on the bridge of his nose, but no glasses anywhere. Which would mean that he hadn’t fallen asleep while watching television. It didn’t make sense.
I stood at the front desk and peeked over the counter. Nobody there. She rang the bell. It chimed across the expanse of lobby.
We waited thirty seconds and got no response. The man on the chaise longue didn’t stir.
She rang the bell again.
Now the man on the chaise longue grunted. A self-accusing grunt. Then he opened his eyes and looked us over vacantly.
She gave the bell a third, serious ring.
The man sprang up and dashed across the lobby. He edged by me and went behind the counter. He was the desk clerk.
“Terrible of me,” he said. “Really terrible of me. Fell asleep waiting for you.”
“Sorry to wake you,” I said.
“Not at all,” said the desk clerk. He brought out a registration card and a ballpoint pen. He was missing the tips of the little and middle fingers on his left hand.
I wrote my name on the card but had second thoughts and crumpled it up and stuffed it in my pocket. I took another card and wrote a fake name and a fake address. An ordinary name and address, but not bad for a spur-of- the-moment name and address. I put down my occupation as real estate.
The desk clerk picked up his thick celluloid-rimmed glasses from beside the telephone and peered intently at the registration card.
“Suginami, Tokyo, … 29 years old, realtor.”
I took a tissue from my pocket and wiped the ink from my fingers.
“Here on business?” asked the clerk.
“Uh, sort of,” I said.
“How many nights?”
“One month,” I said.
“One month?” He gave me a blank-white-sheet-of-drawing-paper look. “You’ll be staying here one whole month?”
“Is there something wrong with that?”
“No, uh, nothing wrong, but well, we like to settle up payment three days at a time.”
I set my satchel on the floor, counted out twenty ten-thousand-yen notes, and laid them on the counter.
“There’s more if that runs out,” I said.
The clerk scooped up the bills with the three fingers of his left hand and counted them with his right. Then he made out a receipt. “Would there be anything special you might care to see in the way of a room?”
“A corner room away from the elevator, if possible.”
The clerk turned around and squinted at the keyboard. After much ado, he chose room 406. The keyboard was almost entirely full. A real success story, the Dolphin Hotel.
There was no such thing as a bellboy, so we carried our bags to the elevator. As she said, no frills. The elevator shook like a large dog with lung disease.
“For an extended stay, there’s nothing like your small, basic hotel.”
“Your small, basic hotel”—not a bad turn of phrase. Like something from the travel pages of a women’s fashion magazine: “After a long trip, your small, basic hotel is just the thing.”
Nonetheless, the first thing I did upon opening the door to our small, basic hotel room was to grab a slipper to smash a cockroach that was creeping along the window frame. Then I picked up two pubic hairs lying by the foot of the bed and disposed of them in the trash. A new experience for me, seeing a cockroach in Hokkaido. Meanwhile, she ran the bath to temperature. And believe me, it was one noisy faucet.
“I tell you, we should’ve stayed in a better hotel,” I opened the bathroom door and yelled in her direction. “We’ve got more than enough money.”
“It’s not a question of money. Our sheep hunt begins here. No argument, it had to be here.”
